Your letters on over 80
different movies with at least a little
math content, and a list of movies featuring real mathematicians.
Suggest some more!

Also,
try our new, free, Big
Number
Calculator.(It uses the BigInteger class in
the latest versions of Java, so
you'll need Netscape 6 or later, Internet Explorer 5 or later, or
Opera. They could have used it in Cube)

A CBS TV series starting its
third year, where David Krumholtz
plays Charlie Eppes, a "world class" mathematician who helps his
brother Don, an FBI agent played by Rob Morrow, solve crimes. There
were some nice moments, as when a colleague advises him not to waste
his productive years chasing serial criminals, but the math in the
premier was pretty lame, mostly the usual equations-on-a-blackboard,
but with some clever visualization of a sprinkler. They did work some
real mathematical thinking into later episodes but Charlie is a bit
too successful predicting the next crime scene from lousy data and
way too guilt-ridden when he fails.

I've upped my rating based on
another episode, this one about
someone getting ready to announce a proof of the Riemann hypothesis
when his daughter is kidnapped. Serious math questions were actually
woven into the plot. Here is a spoiler in
rot13:

Leaving the Wilbur Theater in
Boston after seeing
the
play Proof, a theatergoer
remarked "This is the year of mathematicians." Proof is now a movie
(Directed by Miramax, staring Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins),
adapted from David Auburn's Tony and Pulitzer winning play. Three of
the four main characters are mathematicians. The father character is
loosely based on John Nash, but the story is fiction and takes a very
different path from A Beautiful Mind, focusing on the daughter.

The title is apt. Proof's plot
is filed with attempts to prove
things: sanity, love, correctness of care decisions, theorems,
authorship, adulthood to an older sibling. Even the champaign bottle
in the first scene is a mysterious counterexample.

In particular, the story asks
if proof checking can be an act of
love. Checking is violent work. You must try to demolish someone
else's creation. But what if you love that person? Is it better to
trust condescendingly or to seek the truth and resolve any doubts?

Proof's themes are universal,
but the emotional life of
mathematicians is dealt with well. Stereotypes are dissected. The
math jokes aren't great but it's fun to hear the two waves of
laughter: from the people who get them immediately and those that
have to wait for the playwright's explanation. Proof's ending is
mathematically satisfying. NYU's
Courant
Institute hosted a symposium on
Proof. PG-13. (There's
a
seduction scene in the play.)

I hated the first half of this
movie. The caricature of
cryptography, right out of
"Mercury
Rising," made me squirm. I was
tempted to walk out, but I had
this review to write, so fortunately I stayed. The second half was
wonderful and made complete sense of Act I. All those Hollywood spy
cliches turn out to be a brilliant device to let us see what happens
from from
John
Nash's perspective.

There is one good math scene
where Nash and some fellow grad
students are in a bar and a bevy of young women walk in, lead by a
very attractive blonde. Nash realizes that all the guys hitting on
the blonde would not be an optimal strategy and that this dating
situation is a counter example to the claims of classical economic
theory. The insight leads to his
Nobel-prize
winning result. If true, this
would be the best eureka yarn since
Newton and the apple. Otherwise the math was a little weak. Lots of
scrawled equations do not a math movie make. More of an explanation
of Nash's
work would have been welcome.

A Beautiful Mind is also one of
the finest love stories ever
filmed. After reading how Andrew
Wiles enjoyed
the full support of his wife while holed up in his attic for seven
years proving Fermat's Last Theorem, I thought there should a hall of
fame for great spouses of mathematicians. Mrs. Nash could be another
charter member. PG-13
(One mild bedroom scene, guys on the
make, high emotional intensity)

I haven't seen this
musical
play about
Wiles' proof (featuring songs like "There's a Big Fat Hole in your
Proof" and "Math Widow"), but I have the album. The play is available
on VHS video tape and DVD from the
Clay
Institute and there is a fine
review of it in the
Notices
of the AMS.

Quantum mechanics beats
Newton's as a metaphor for human thought.
Our actions are only a projection of the super-positioned thoughts
swirling in our brains. Why did Werner Heisenberg as director of the
Nazi nuclear program fail to build an atomic bomb? Distaste for
Hitler? Lack of resources? Incompetence? A complex linear combination
of all three? Will we ever know? Did he?

In Copenhagen the ghosts of
Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and Bohr's
wife, Margrethe, explore the motives behind their meeting in 1941.
Along the way they explain a fair amount of physics, exhibit some
good mathematical thinking and let us experience the deep emotional
bond between teacher and protege.

In the opening scene of this
romantic comedy, Jill Clayburgh,
playing a mathematics professor, proves the "snake lemma" of
homological algebra:

0 -> A -> B -> C -> 0 | | | 0 -> A'-> B'-> C'-> 0

to an obnoxious graduate
student. To the best of our knowledge,
this is the most erudite mathematical scene in a major motion
picture, though spoiled somewhat by a heavy handed portrayal of the
grad student. The rest of the film is mostly
math-free, unfortunately. R

Dustin Hoffman has moved to his
wife's home town in Cornwall,
England in the hope of getting some astrophysics done. His bored
wife's flirtations lead to serious trouble. Somewhere along the line
she mischievously changes a plus sign to a minus sign in a set of
gravitational equations on a blackboard. Hoffman's response when he
finally notices is by far the best and most realistic portrayal of a
mathematician in action in the movies.

Caution:
The moral of this film is
"don't mess
with a mathematician," so, as you might expect, a great deal of
violence occurs. R

Math ****
Film ****

The
U.S. FBI has lobbied for
legislation that would prevent your use of cryptography unless the
Government can instantly access your unencoded messages. Similar
threats exist in other countries. In the long run, it is impossible
to suppress cryptography without restricting mathematical research
and teaching. Our
CipherSaber
page
demonstrates this by showing how little knowledge is required to
build a strong encryption program.

Like its
Fields-medalistSalieriesqe
math professor, this movie begins by putting a hard problem on the
blackboard: Can anyone save a defiant, troubled kid from
working-class
South
Boston who happens to be a
Ramanujan-level
genius?

But instead of a convincing
solution, we get easy answers. Robin
Williams' soberly played shrink brushes past Hunting's intelligence
to get at his abusive childhood, never contemplating genius as an
equal source of pain. The women are either on a pedestal or deserve
to be. The movie plinks every soft target that gets in it sights:
gullible psychotherapists, corporate recruiters, snotty Harvard
students, the NSA,
even
MIT
custodial foremen.

The film's best aspect is the
love and care lavished on getting
South Boston right. If they had only done as well by the
mathematicians, depicted here as corporate, arrogant, joyless and
cold. The movie shows the outside of MIT, but not the inside.

There is so much talent here
that I want to give an Incomplete and
make them turn in a more thoughtful version next semester. Too bad
serious movies don't get sequels.R (mostly
for foul language it would seem)

Math *
Film ***

Note: Bert Jagers created a
Maple worksheet on the math in Good
Will Hunting:

This a movie about madness, not
mathematics. The math, computer
science, theology, and pharmacology are bad. (One faux pas is a
suggestion that one could try all possible 216 digit numbers.) But
they are brilliantly combined with music, and camera work to place us
in the tormented mind of a paranoid obsessive seeking the central
truth of the universe --which is excreted by computers just before
they melt down -- while he is pursued by Wall Street brokers and
Hassidic Jews who know he is onto something.
See
the Pi page for more
links.R

Robin Williams explains
Newton's Law of Gravitation to a life
drawing class in this '90s remake of the 1961
Absent
Minded Professor, and there is a
lot of pseudo-science in the
background -- even the titles are filled with math symbology. But the
story has been whimsyectomized: the long suffering girlfriend,
promoted to college president, really suffers, the professor feels
her pain, the goons are scary, and there is a poignant death scene.
If the Professor can make a robot fly, why does he need flubber?
Still, the movie-clip-emoting robot redeems the movie, out cuteing
R2D2. Weebo deserved an Oscar
for
best supporting actress. PG

Tom Hanks plays a twelve year
old boy whose wish to be big is
granted by a magical arcade game. His ability to find work and even
succeed mocks the adult world. At a dinner party, Hanks helps the
young son, whom the real adults are ignoring, with his homework. In
the process he offers a nice explanation of basic algebra.
PG

A high school math teacher,
played by Edward James Olmos, gets a
group of inner city kids to learn calculus, amazing and threatening
the educational establishment. Some decent calculus teaching is shown
in this true story. PG

Freelance spies track down an
all powerful code breaking chip
developed by a mysteriously funded mathematician named Gunter Janek.
In a brief scene, the long-haired, white-suited Janek lectures on the
possibility of finding a faster way to factor numbers, shouting lots
of big math words, but not really explaining anything. Still, the
film correctly points out that a breakthrough in factoring could
happen and would be worth a lot to criminals and people who break
codes.
The mathematician Len Adleman
advised on the making of this move.
Click
here for his story. PG-13

Mel Gibson plays a former
teacher turned recluse whose face is
badly disfigured. He befriends a troubled boy and helps him prepare
for a military school's entrance exam. In one of his lessons, Gibson
shows the boy how to find the center of any circle by constructing
the perpendicular bisectors of two chords. The figure he draws isn't
quite general enough: the chords share a common point and they
needn't. But that's the least of their troubles as the secret of
Gibson's past comes back to haunt their relationship.
PG-13

In this somewhat morbid
chronicle of five generations of sturdy
women, we see Antonia's granddaughter Theresa, who grows from a child
prodigy to become a mathematician, lecturing on cohomology and
reading a monograph on differential geometry in preference to nursing
her baby. In a movie filled with stereotypes, we should not expect a
woman mathematician to be anything but cold. One nit: Theresa says "X
comma A" while reading a diagram during her lecture scene but it
appears in the subtitles as "X.A". The translators must habitually
change European commas into English decimal points. Dutch.
Unrated, Quite a bit of S.ex and Violence

Jodie Foster is perfect when
she defines prime numbers for a group
of Washington bigwigs and is greeted by blank stares. But why does
the movie have to work so hard explaing her devotion to science? The
book's nonsense about pi is not in the movie. PG

Math ***
Film ****

Real
Men Do Count

If we had a dollar for every
war movie made, we could afford a T1
Internet connection. Yet almost every soldier flick is predictable:
If the movie has a happy ending, the heroes win a few in the
beginning, then start losing until the very end when they win the big
battle, but the supporting actor is killed. If it's a tragedy, they
lose in the beginning, win in the middle, lose the big one and the
star dies. Good military tactics never seem to play any
part
in the outcome. We know of only two movies where the heroes even
bother to count how many of the enemy are out there. These movies
are:

Akira Kurosawa's masterful
story of a 16th century Japanese
village that defends itself by hiring down-and-out samurai. The
wisest teaches his comrades in arms to plan. Japanese. No
rating. Fairly violent.

Clint Eastwood leads an all
star cast in search of Nazi gold. But
first they have to take out the German tanks one at a time. How do
they know when they're all gone? They counted them first, silly.
PG

Math **
Film ****

Computers
in the Movies

The Charles Babbage Institute
at the University of Minnesota beat
me to this one. They had a list (see link to Hollywood and Computers
at the Internet Archives, below) of 42
movies with
computers in them. But here is one they missed:

If you want to know what a
scientific computer looked like in the
good old days, see Stanley Kubrick's classic satire on nuclear
doomsday with its fine scenes of an IBM
7094/
1401
installation. Peter Sellers almost saves the world with a transistor
radio hidden in a 1403 printer.Unrated.
OK, I think, for
older teens

Computer ***
Film *****

Movies
in Mathematics

Here is a paper
http://www.siam.org/siamnews/11-01/networks.pdf
that discusses the properties of the Kevin Bacon Graph (KBG), whose
nodes are actors in major motion pictures (as listed at imdb.com) and
where each node is connected by an edge iff the two actors appeared
together in a film. Interestingly, its largest connected component
contains 90% of all actors.

More Movies Suggested by Our
Readers

Roger Cooke asks "how in the
world did you overlook [this] story
of
Sonya
Kovalevskaya's stay in
Sweden--advertised as the
feminist
movie of the 1980's. Actually, as a female colleague said to me after
seeing it, 'That movie says that to be a female mathematician you
have to be ugly, neurotic, and a bad mother.' Since I have spent
considerable time researching and writing about Kovalevskaya, I
concur. Mathematically they missed the point entirely about
Kovalevskaya. On the plus side, where else would you see actors
portraying Weierstrass and Mittag-Leffler?"

"On the personal side, they
also got it wrong. I remember thinking
Meg Ryan was hardly the ideal actress to play Einstein's brilliant
niece in IQ,
but she'd have been about right
physically (with her hair dyed brown) to play Kovalevskaya. Instead
they got an extremely homely Swedish actress to play the part, and
they made her a temperamental prima donna at her first lecture in
Stockholm. Actually, she was diffident to the extreme, and always
afraid she wasn't doing a good enough job. As for my colleague's
comments, well, Kovalevskaya was
neurotic and a bad mother,
but she wasn't ugly. A century after her death, though, she still
leaves a legacy of two very brilliant mathematical results." Search
google.com
with the key word "
Kovalevskaya" for more resources about her.

" P.S. There is a mountain on
the far side of the moon that the
Soviets named after Kovalevskaya (their robot space ship
[Luna
3] was the first to photograph
the far side of the moon). I
presume that's the reason for the title, though no reference is made
to it in the movie, either at the beginning or the end."

Walter Matthau as
Albert
Einstein plays matchmaker for
his niece played by Meg Ryan. Judy
Ann Brown's favorite scene is where Meg Ryan attempts to explain to
Tim Robbins why she can't dance with him: she can only walk half the
distance between them and then half again and half again and she will
never reach him. Rhiju Das was impressed when Meg Ryan's character
puts the Schrodinger equation on the board, in operator
form.PG

This dark, nihilistic film has
generated the most
letters
to Math in
the Movies. A group of people
are trapped in a nightmare lattice
of cubic rooms and have to figure out how to escape. Cartesian
coordinates and prime numbers play a key role. The moral: factor or
die! The most interesting math here is in thinking about how they
made the movie. R brutal
violence, language

Laura Parigi, from Florence,
Italy and Dan Schnabel suggest this
Italian movie, written and directed by Mario Martone. It's the story
of an important Italian mathematician looking at the last week of his
life before he kills himself in 1959. I haven't seen it yet.
Unrated

Jon Reeves says you must
see, this biopic about
Richard
Feynman. There's a priceless
scene where he has a calculating
duel with a guy with an abacus. Feynman, using pencil and paper, adds
a bit slower, but multiplies slightly faster, and really whips him in
the cube root competition. Afterward, he explains it all to his
fiancee. PG

A bright 8-year-old is placed
in a program for gifted children.
Edie Bennett liked the scene where a teacher has several odd and even
numbers on the board and asks how many of them are divisible by 2.
Tate raises his hand and answers "All of them." PG

Keith Dennis mentions this
sci-fi movie about some famous
scientist being taken out of Russia. He dies, but they take chemicals
from his brain and recover his memory. Early in the movie there a car
is rushing to an airport and the camera pans down to show a book on
the seat, presumably to tell us that we have a physicist in the car.
Unfortunately the book is Artin & Tate, Class Field Theory, the
green IAS version. It must have sounded like a physics book to the
prop man. I haven't seen this one. Made
for TV

Richard Maso suggests this
6-episode TV series, sometimes shown
spliced together on TV, and available on laserdisc, etc. There are
some bits of comedic, Lewis-Carroll-type math. In particular, the
narrator argues that the number of planets in the universe is
infinite, but the number of inhabited planets is finite. Therefore
the fraction of inhabited planets is zero, and the universe contains
no life.Made for TV

Bernd Ensing suggests this
family movie about a boy who inherits
the Minnesota Twins from his grandfather. He takes his homework to
the ballpark, where the whole team struggles with a problem about two
men wanting to paint a house: It takes the first man three hours to
paint a house, the second one needs five hours. How long will it take
both of them working together? Fun movie, but I found the solution
unedifying. PG

"You mentioned that in the
movie It's My Turn (1980), except for
all-too-brief glimpse of the proof of the snake lemma of homological
algebra, the rest of the film is math-free. But actually, there are
some tid-bits scattered here and there throughout.

Jill has an exchange with a
precocious boy, probably junior high school age, about prime numbers.
This was a big disappointment for me: mathematically precocious kids
this age are a lot smarter than was represented in the exchange.

At one point, some
University administrator, probably a Dean, mentions to Jill Clayburgh
that 'Group theory is a really hard area to work in'. I wish our own
administrators would believe that.

Jill's father, at one point,
introduces his daughter as a mathematician who is working in finite
simple groups. How many group theorists have parents who know what they
do? Also, I heard as an anecdote, that this scene had to be edited. The
father had first introduced his daughter as someone working in the area
of finite, simple, ABELIAN groups. A mathematician (or someone
knowledgeable about the subject) present during the screening broke out
in laughter on hearing this.

Jill, at one point working
on the back of an envelope, is frustrated that she `can't quite get
this 2-fusion problem to work out'.

The movie ends on an up-beat
note, mathematically, when the obnoxious grad student and Jill share
(in a rather cryptic exchange) some clever insight that would lead to
the solution of the classification problem. Interestingly enough, 1980
(the year of the movie) is the more-or-less agreed date that the finite
simple groups were classified."

Translations of Math in the Movies

Other Math humor

Movie information links
provided courtesy of the
Internet
Movie Database,
a truly cool site.Motion
Picture Association of
America ratings are shown where
available. Other comments on
suitability for children minds are the author's personal opinions.
Concerned parents should seek additional points of view and
pre-screen movies if possible.

Comments and additional
references to movies where mathematics or
mathematicians are accurately portrayed are welcome. Mumbo-jumbo,
pseudo-math and mad scientist cliches (e.g.
Jurassic
Park,
Independence
Day) are not what we are looking
for. Please send e-mail with as
much specific information as possible to: